It’s more like being the roadie for a band. For starters, there’s the sheer physical exertion: the endless lifting, hauling, setting up, and tearing down. “Put it over here, no, over there, there, there!” Then there is the ass-wiping, the puking, the tantrums, the trashing of rooms. There is the procurement of playmates. And the ridiculous demands about food. The gig sounds more fun than it is. The thing is, though, even on the worst days, it still beats a straight job. There are nights when the lights go down, and I stand in the boys’ bedroom doorway with as much awe and gratitude as any starstruck stagehand ever felt standing in the wings.
One such night, I paused to eavesdrop in the hall as Patrick tucked the boys in.
“Do you know what I want to be when I grow up, Daddy?” I heard my firstborn say. I waited, expecting an elaboration on his recent ambition to become the night watchman in a museum.
“What?”
“A Cub Scout den leader.” I thought my heart would just give out then and there, because that night it had been my first turn at leading his Cub Scout den.
If “Be Prepared” is the Scout motto, “Wing It” is mine. I still didn’t have my leader uniform. I read the meeting literature for the first time that day over lunch. I scribbled a plan on an index card, and ran to the dollar store a couple of hours before the meeting with the only two dollars I had in my pocket to pick up supplies. We made crafts and performed a skit. I not only got through it, I had apparently upheld the dignity of the office sufficiently to trump museum night watchman in the shining eyes of my son. Somehow, I had managed to pull it off.
On a tall shelf against his bedroom wall, I could see the newest race car in his pinewood fleet, complete with tail fins and a chrome paint job, just as he had sketched it for his father. Somehow, Patrick pulled it off, too.
Somehow, I guess we always do.
5.
Ring of Fire
On our sixth wedding anniversary, the eve of his fortieth birthday, my husband decided to surprise me by cutting off his shoulder-length blond hair.
“Surprise!” he said, as he came through the door, grinning self-consciously and holding up his lopped-off ponytail with the guileless charm of a little boy clutching a fistful of dandelions.
“Surprise,” I said weakly, handing him the damp test stick with its pink vertical lines like bars on a tiny prison window. Impossibly, in spite of being on the pill, breast-feeding a toddler, and the almost complete absence of opportunity, I was pregnant with our third child, and his fourth.
Slack-jawed, Patrick stared at the stick. His mouth closed, opened, closed again.
“You’re not,” he said.
“I am,” I said.
He stared back at the stick, and I thought I saw comprehension dawn on his stricken face.
“You peed on this,” he said finally, looking back to me for confirmation. I wasn’t sure whether he was asking if there could be some kind of mix-up, or if he just found it distasteful. I nodded soberly, thinking that the unfolding scene was already completely unsuitable for the baby’s memory book. We would have to lie.
Patrick slumped into the nearest chair, still clasping his limp hank of hair. Looking at it, I was reminded of that famous O. Henry short story “The Gift of the Magi,” where Della sells her hair to buy her husband, Jim, a chain for his heirloom pocket watch. Only it turns out that Jim has sold the watch for a hair ornament, and both gifts are useless. Of course, it all works out in time for Christmas, and in the end they realize that what matters most is that they have each other. Except in our version, the husband plummets into a spectacular midlife tailspin, during which time the wife is out of her mind with rage, hormones, and confusion, and there are children who need help with wiping whether or not right now is a good time.
There were days I didn’t think we would make it to the next week, let alone Christmas. Here’s what they don’t tell you to expect in What to Expect When You’re Expecting, or any other pregnancy how-to book I’ve ever read: Even the most carefully planned and anticipated pregnancy can rock a marriage on a seismic scale. It can test a relationship like few other things can, and show exactly where the fault lines lie. In the space of two blurry years, we had gone from two of us to five of us, with the birth of our first two children and the temporary custody of a third from my husband’s previous marriage. We loved each other and our kids, but in the course of keeping up with even the minimum demands of parenting, a few things had gotten pushed to the back burner. Big things, like sleep and sex; and little things, like good books and long kisses.
We weren’t relating to each other as lovers, or even as friends—only as stereotypes. Patrick was cast in the part of wayward son. Me, the overbearing mother. It was awful, a cat-and-mouse game that reinforced us as adversaries with every round. He avoided, I nagged. I persecuted, he went underground. His office became his bunker, and his days there encroached into night. After supper, he’d kiss me with a weary sigh, as if being dragged out of the house against his will. I bought it for a while. Advertising agencies are notorious for excessive expectations of overtime. Don’t bother coming in Monday if you don’t come in Sunday, goes the joke, which everyone in the business knows isn’t, really. He’s working hard to support us, I’d think. Poor guy. I could ride that glass coach till midnight.
“I thought you were coming home two hours ago,” I’d seethe into the phone, when the enchantment wore off.
“What do you want me to do? Miss the deadline? Lose the account?” He always had me there.
“I just want you to come home.”
“I’m coming,” he’d promise.
But he wouldn’t come, and we’d run through the exact same lines a couple of hours later, at a shriller pitch. It was making me crazier and crazier, angrier and angrier. I upped the offensive, demanding to know who else was working late, why it always fell to him to save the day, what, exactly, he was doing there all by himself, night after night. I was determined to get to the bottom of things. I pressed for details, playing both good cop and bad cop, feigning interest and sympathy, then bringing the heat. I accused him of not wanting to come home.
The trouble with getting to the bottom of things, says my mother, who knows, is that there you are, at the bottom.
“You’re right,” he finally said to me, when I’d called him in a rage, after waking up to find myself still alone at three o’clock in the morning. I’d pried my way through his excuses, one after the other, like I was tearing up rotten floorboards with a crowbar. And then I fell through. Stripped of pretense, his voice was flat and lifeless. “I don’t want to come home.”
There it was, the bottom.
“Then don’t,” I said, crying. “Don’t come home. Ever.”
It sounds maudlin and terrible. It was maudlin and terrible. I could leave it at that and let you think I was the long-suffering wife, and he was the cold-hearted bastard. (Go ahead, think it for a minute, before I get to the next part. He has that much coming.) But it was Kabuki theater, love suicide. Those were painted-on feelings, and we were lost in our roles.
Mothering is a tremendous force. It can possess you completely, eclipsing every other passion, point of view, and relationship. Maybe I was especially vulnerable to being possessed because I had never really consciously identified with my maternal side, and it snuck up on me. Maybe it was because Patrick was used to being bossed around by his mother, and her death during my first pregnancy created a vacuum that sucked me in. Maybe it’s just what happens. It’s what happened with me, anyway. I had control issues, especially when it came to parenting. It was my way exactly or it was child endangerment. That’s literally how I saw it. I was the ultimate, infallible authority where the kids were concerned, benevolent and omnipotent unless crossed. Then, off with his head.
When a parent with control issues is constantly broadcasting the message that the other parent can’t be trusted to make decisions or work through problems without advice and direction, they set up a self-fulfilling prophecy. The e
xpectation of failure is loud and clear. There’s no chance of acquiring or demonstrating competency when someone is constantly standing over your shoulder, saying, “Not like that. Like this.” The parent being critiqued and managed is robbed of the opportunity to figure things out by trial and error, and being a parent is all trial and error. There’s no other way to learn it except by doing it. You wobble along, and it’s in the process of making adjustments that the foundation of your relationship with your child is laid. If anyone besides the baby had told me, “You’re doing it wrong,” the first time I held, fed, or changed him, it would have destroyed whatever shred of confidence I had as a new mother. I would have been devastated. But I said it to Patrick again and again, if not in those words, with a look and a sigh as I stepped in and took over. I’d elbow him aside and complain that he didn’t show more initiative. I’d issue orders and fault him for being passive. I’d critique his interactions with his children, and shame him for not being more engaged. I stripped him of his self-worth and his dignity.
And then I wondered why he wouldn’t come home.
He withdrew to his office like a teenager to his room, surrounded by his guitars and comic books. He was drinking too much, sleeping too little, and if I hadn’t been so insane myself, I might have seen sooner that the man I knew and loved had checked out some time ago. If I was capable of being honest with myself, I had, too. Each of us crept outside the marriage to steal what the other would not give. He wanted space. I wanted a devoted husband and father. The one I found was already someone else’s, but it didn’t matter to me. We were just friends, spending time together. Granted, it was lot of time, and if you counted the time I was spending with him in my head, it was most of the time. I wasn’t in love, but I loved to be with this man. He was gallant and swaggering, a take-charge kind of guy. He bristled protectively when I alluded to my lonely nights, and if I didn’t actually lean my head on his shoulder, I let myself picture it there.
He was a family man, and that quality that made him so attractive to me would have probably kept us both out of real trouble, regardless, but my surprise pregnancy was a timely intervention. Even so, I was slow to shift my emotional focus back to my marriage. It had drifted further than I was prepared to admit. One night, I woke up from a vivid dream where I was standing opposite my friend, our palms on each other’s hearts. It was an intimate gesture Patrick and I had picked up along the way, a way of connecting. The image was jolting, much more than had it been sexually explicit. I took it as a wake-up call, calling me back from the brink before any harm was done.
But harm was done. What a person doesn’t know can hurt them. To someone looking at my marriage from the outside in, it would have looked very much like one or both of us was having an affair. Neither of us was screwing around. But neither were we being faithful to each other. It looked nearly the same as if someone was cheating, and it felt nearly the same. Only there was no one outside of the marriage who we could point to and say, he or she is partly to blame. It was all on us.
We still loved each other, but we were not at the top of our game. Facing another round of pregnancy and infancy was more than we could do gracefully. And so we were blundering our way through it, pelting each other with resentment and blame. In and of themselves, our grievances were unexceptional. They all came down to how we divided available time and energy. In fatter years, we could have arbitrated with more civility. But this was famine, and we were starving people fighting over the last thin scrap.
Every emotion and perception was amplified and distorted. “You always” and “You never” became the constant, looping refrain. It felt like our wedding bands had twisted into Möbius strips—around and around we’d go, never getting to the other side.
I have a friend who has managed to maintain a vital and dynamic relationship with her husband for more than thirty years. She says the secret is very simple: they just have to be willing to renegotiate everything, forever. It was time for Patrick and me to sit down at the bargaining table. We both had unmet needs, wants, and demands. This was a serious test of our marriage. It deserved and required our undivided energy and attention. We needed to be in lockdown at Camp David, with a full entourage of aides and interpreters. We needed bottled spring water and frequent stretch breaks; guided meditations and long, quiet walks in the woods. We needed all calls held and nothing on each day’s agenda but working out a new deal.
But we had kids. There were clothes to wash, baths to run, library books to return, and crusts to cut. We couldn’t scream, or cry, or curse, as loud or as long as we sometimes needed to. And yet, as much as the presence of children inhibited and hindered us, I am not sure we would have hung in there without them. In a way, they were our entourage: a steadying influence that kept us from walking away on days when it felt too fucking hard.
The urge to escape was strong. On our worst days, I thought I might as well have an affair. I fantasized about leaving, or making him leave. Then I’d remember I was three months pregnant and he was my sons’ father, and there was the house, the money, and all this stuff we shared. As hard as it was to stay in my marriage, it seemed a whole lot harder to get out of it. That, right there, is the whole point of marriage as an institution. There’s legal and financial infrastructure that can’t be dismantled overnight, no matter how badly you want to walk away. And if children are part of what you’ve built up together, you can’t tear the whole thing down anyway, because you tear them up with it. You can only rearrange the particulars: who and what goes where, and with whom.
There were days that the only thing holding me back from kicking him out was the thought that my pain-in-the-ass husband would be an even bigger pain-in-the-ass ex-husband. And I would have to put up with him, because of the children. As long as I was stuck with him anyhow, I might as well keep him close enough to take out the trash and help with bedtime.
I find the flip side of this line of reasoning useful even today.
“I will be the ex-wife from hell,” I promise sweetly, whenever I catch him admiring someone younger, blonder, and bouncier in the side-view mirror. He chuckles and gives a heartfelt “whoowhee.” Today, I like to think, he is happy to be stuck with me.
Nobody should have to stay in a relationship that’s broken beyond repair, but there’s something to be said for sealing off the exits. Being legally trapped together should be the right of any committed couple willing to endure it. When you’ve got to turn and face each other, there’s a chance you can work it out.
Patrick did come home that night, and I let him stay, because we didn’t know what else to do. After three nights sleeping apart and two days not speaking, we went to a marriage counselor. Her name was Nancy. She hardly said much of anything. She didn’t have to. Just having a neutral third party in the room made us more mindful and aware of what we were saying to each other and how we said it. It didn’t take long to turn things around. Our issues weren’t the insurmountable, irreversible barriers they had felt like. We weren’t the bad people we felt like. The issues were just issues, and we were just people who needed to upgrade a few skills. The fact that we both kept showing up for our weekly sessions became visible evidence of our commitment to each other, and that goodwill began to spread into the other days of the week. A kind word here, a soft gesture there. We were still so fragile in that first month or so of therapy. If we came up against any degree of conflict, we would back away from each other as if from a fallen wire. “Let’s save this for Nancy,” we’d agree, and somehow manage to avoid it until then. By the time we got to Nancy, the issue in question wouldn’t seem like such a big, snaky thing anymore. Gingerly, we began to try it at home. Clutching our photocopied diagrams of “How to Practice Active Listening,” we’d approach a topic like students learning a foreign language. “I think, uh, no, wait . . . I feel . . . you should, no, wait. What was the question?”
The birth of our third and last child mirrored love’s labor. My prior two birthing experiences had started out as all-natu
ral, at-home deliveries. The first was successful, but there were complications with the afterbirth that required a night in the hospital; the next labor was long and painful, and ended with an emergency C-section. I was younger, and cockier then, and very controlling. When things didn’t go according to plan, I had a hard time accepting it, and added unnecessarily to my fear and pain. The third time was different. I still had ideals, but I was willing to let go of expectations. I didn’t have anything to prove, but only wanted what was best for me and my baby. I hoped to avoid another caesarean, but neither did I want to repeat a long and difficult labor before winding up in the operating room anyway. I had to trust my doctor, accept advice, and be ready to make compromises. I gave myself permission to ask for help, and seek relief, if I needed it. I had a birth plan that I took seriously, but held lightly.
When our son was born, the sun was setting outside the delivery room. I felt no pain. I had no fear. Patrick stood at my side, holding my hand, his golden hair haloed by the dying sky. Our eyes burned into each other, as if we were the only two people in the room, in this marriage. But we weren’t. This birth would add to all that was already between and behind us, binding us and holding us, sometimes against our will.
He squeezed my hand, hard, and with everything I had, I bore down and pushed.
6.
Penis Ennui
A friend of mine changed her daughter’s diaper in front of me the other day. I couldn’t hide my shock, and let out a little gasp.
“What?” my friend said.
“No penis,” I said, pointing.
Of course, I knew there wouldn’t be. It wasn’t like she’d crossdressed the baby and I’d been duped. I have plenty of friends with daughters. I’ve seen vulvas. It happens that I own one. But having changed my own children’s bottoms approximately 18,000 times, I am conditioned to expect a penis inside a diaper. When there isn’t one, I experience an irrational jolt of panic, as if maybe it fell off.
Planting Dandelions Page 6
